A Genome-wide Survey of Mutations in the Jurkat Cell Line

Abstract

The Jurkat cell line has an extensive history as a model of T cell signaling. But at the turn of the 21st century, some irregularities were observed in Jurkats expression of central regulators of T cell receptor signaling, which raised doubts about how closely the cell line paralleled normal human T cells. While numerous expression deficiencies have been described in Jurkat, genetic explanations have only been provided for a handful of defects. Here, we report a comprehensive catolog of genomic variation in the Jurkat cell line based on whole-genome sequencing. With this list of all detectable, non-reference sequences, we prioritize potentially damaging mutations by mining public databases for functional effects. We confirm the majority of documented mutations in Jurkat and propose links from detrimental gene variants to observed expression abnormalities in the cell line. This work ties together decades of molecular experiments and serves as a resource that will streamline both the interpretation of past research and the design of future Jurkat studies.